Rep. Tom Feeney, R-Fla., said he enjoyed “Recount,” the HBO movie about the aftermath of the 2000 election in Florida, although he has a few details to quibble over regarding his own depiction in the film.
“I complained early on that I didn’t know the actor who was playing me,” he joked. “I thought Brad Pitt should play me.”
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Feeney’s perspective on the film is unique: The speaker of the Florida House at the time, he was intimately involved in the proceedings, from election night until the U.S. Supreme Court ended things more than a month later.
“I thought it leaned to the Democratic perspective, but no more than you’d expect from Hollywood in nine of 10 cases,” said Feeney, who watched an advance copy of the film with his staff over chips, popcorn and beer late last week (it premieres on HBO this Sunday). His legislative director, Erin Kanoy, also had an interest: She worked with the Bush campaign in Florida at the time.
“It was unfair to Katherine Harris,” Feeney said, referring to the former congresswoman and Florida secretary of state, “but I thought it made [Bush campaign attorneys] Jim Baker and Ben Ginsberg look good.”
Among his other criticisms are his beverage of choice and his house, as depicted: “No. 1, I’m a Bud drinker, not a bourbon drinker. [And] my wife’s going to be surprised when she finds out I had a plantation in Tallahassee.”
In fact, he told us, far from living in luxury, he was actually “a prisoner — half the people wanted to lynch me from a tree and half thought I was the biggest hero in the world.”
He also objects to the filmmakers’ suggestion that he essentially colluded with national Republicans in moving the state legislature to ratify the Election Day results.
“The truth is far from it,” he said, adding that he never knew the Bush campaign opinion on that “until I saw Jim Baker on TV saying that it was a possibility.
“The good news is that I get credit for coming up with this idea, even though it wasn’t me.”
For that, he credits several constitutional scholars, including John Yoo, who would later become famous for his memos for the Bush administration on torture and executive power.
Vote like a Floridian
To promote its movie, HBO got its hands on a few of the actual Votomatic Florida voting machines used in the controversial 2000 presidential election, complete with butterfly ballots and hanging chads. The cable network is making a dozen of them available for residents in Los Angeles and New York to try their hand at voting, Florida-style, tomorrow. But hey, HBO! What about D.C.?! How about a little love? We’d like to hang some chads of our own. We’ll just have to settle for trying to crash Frank Luntz’s house: Amidst his vast collections of pop-culture and political memorabilia, the pollster and message guru has a punch-card voting booth from Florida, signed by none other than Katherine Harris.
